# Chapter 615: A Pattern of Pain
The heavy steel door of the command center slid shut with a pneumatic hiss, sealing Nyra inside a tomb of humming servers and cold, blue light. The air tasted of ozone and stale coffee, a sterile environment that did nothing to calm the frantic thrumming beneath her ribs. She had dismissed her staff, sent ruku bez and his team to the med-bay under armed guard, not as prisoners, but as precious, terrified assets. Alone now, the weight of his report settled upon her like a physical shroud. It wasn't just a monster. It was a ghost wearing his face.
She stood before the primary holographic table, its surface a sprawling, three-dimensional map of the known world. The Riverchain glimmered like a silver spine, and the fortified city-states were jeweled nodes along its length. But her eyes were drawn to the grey, ashen expanses between them, the Bloom-Wastes. With a flick of her wrist, she summoned the data. Red pins bloomed across the map, each one a confirmed Bloomblight sighting in the last cycle. They were scattered, seemingly random, a rash of infection breaking out across the skin of the world. One pulsed insistently near the Iron-Tooth Mountains—ruku bez's encounter. The Echo.
Her fingers, feeling stiff and foreign, manipulated the controls. She needed order, a pattern, anything to grasp onto. The Withering King was a being of immense, alien power, but it was still a force. Forces followed rules. They left trails. She began cross-referencing the sighting locations with every scrap of tactical data she possessed: ley line concentrations, resource deposits, old-world ruins, known Synod outposts. Nothing. The correlations were weak, the patterns nonexistent. It was like trying to predict the path of a dust storm in a hurricane. Frustration, cold and sharp, pricked at her. She was a strategist. She solved puzzles. This was a void.
She leaned forward, her reflection a pale, haunted oval on the dark surface of the table. The lines around her eyes seemed deeper, etched by a sleepless night and a psychic scream that still echoed in the quiet corners of her mind. She had been so sure. The fragments were power sources. The King was draining them, growing stronger. The strategy was simple: cut off the supply. But the Echo changed everything. It wasn't just draining power; it was distilling it, refining it into something sentient, something personal.
Her gaze drifted to a secondary console, a dedicated link to Elara's archive. The historian had been methodically digitizing every pre-Bloom record she could get her hands on, from official Crownlands ledgers to faded caravan manifests. It was a long shot, a desperate grasp for a different kind of data. Not about the world, but about the man whose ghost was now hunting them.
"Elara," Nyra's voice was a dry rasp in the silence. "Access protocol 'Sableki-Vale.' I need historical cross-referencing."
"Protocol accepted, Chancellor," Elara's calm, synthesized voice replied from the speaker. "What are your parameters?"
Nyra took a breath. "I'm feeding you a list of geographical coordinates. I want you to search your entire database for any significant events that occurred at or near these locations. Focus on personal records, journey logs, anything tied to individuals. Specifically, Soren Vale."
A pause. "That is a… broad parameter set, Chancellor. The data may be fragmented."
"I know. Do it."
One by one, she fed the coordinates of the Bloomblight sightings into the system. The first was a desolate stretch of the northern trade route. Elara's search returned a single, highlighted file: *Caravan 7, Manifest and Log. Captain Alaric Vale.* Nyra's breath hitched. Soren's father. The log entry was brief, a final, desperate report of an attack. The coordinates were a perfect match. The Bloomblight hadn't just appeared there; it had appeared on Soren's grave.
Her heart hammered against her ribs. She moved to the next pin, a location deep within the Sable League's territory, near an abandoned training arena. Elara's search churned, then produced a match: a Ladder Commission record from five years prior. *Trial 417: Soren Vale vs. Kaelen 'The Bastard' Vor.* The outcome was listed as a victory for Vor, but the notes detailed a brutal, drawn-out fight where Soren had nearly won, losing only after collapsing from Cinder Cost. The arena was now a haunted place, marked by a Bloomblight.
A third pin, near a small, independent settlement on the border of the Wastes. The search returned a local newspaper article, digitized from a microfiche archive. The headline read: *Local Hero Thwarts Bloomblight Attack.* The story was of a lone, debt-bound fighter who had saved the settlement's water purifier from a lesser creature, fighting until he collapsed. The name was Soren Vale. The article mentioned the settlement's profound gratitude, a debt of honor they could never repay. Now, a new, more powerful Bloomblight stood sentinel on that same spot.
The pattern was no longer random. It was a pilgrimage.
Nyra sank into her chair, the cold leather groaning under her weight. The blue light of the map painted her face in shades of sorrow. She felt a profound and sickening dread, a feeling far worse than the fear of a superior enemy. This was something else. This was violation.
She fed the last coordinate, the one from ruku bez. The Iron-Tooth Mountains. The search took longer, digging through older, more obscure records. Then, a hit. Not a battle log or a news report, but a journal entry, scanned from a water-damaged page. It was from a Crownlands Warden, part of a patrol that had found a young boy wandering the wastes alone. The entry described the boy—malnourished, catatonic, clutching a broken sword—and the location where he was found. It was the exact spot where the Echo had been sighted.
It wasn't just a place of power. It was the place where Soren's story as a survivor had begun. The place he had lost everything.
The pieces clicked into place with a horrifying, crystalline clarity. The Withering King wasn't just drawing power from the fragments. It was drawing meaning. It was tracing the contours of Soren's life, walking the paths of his pain and triumph, and using the emotional resonance of those moments to forge its new soldiers. Each Bloomblight wasn't just a monster; it was a shrine built on a ghost's life, a twisted effigy crafted from memory and ash.
The King was learning him. It wasn't just mimicking his fighting style; it was trying to understand his soul. It was consuming his history to build a better weapon.
Nyra's hands clenched into fists, her nails digging into her palms. The strategic problem had evaporated, replaced by a moral and emotional abyss. How could you fight an enemy that knew your champion's every scar? How could you outthink a foe that was feasting on the very essence of the man you were trying to save?
Her mind raced, leaping from one horrifying conclusion to the next. If the King was using Soren's past as a blueprint, then it wasn't just hunting them. It was coming for everything Soren had ever touched, everyone he had ever saved. Every life he had impacted was now a potential target, a source of fuel for the King's abominable creation.
She thought of Elara, safe in her archive. She thought of Captain Bren, still missing. She thought of Lyra, fighting in the arenas. She thought of Finn, the young squire who idolized Soren. They were all part of his story. They were all part of the pattern.
A cold dread, sharp and absolute, washed over Nyra. It wasn't a strategy. It was a desecration. The Withering King wasn't just using Soren's power; it was walking in his footsteps, treading the paths of his pain and triumph to fuel its hatred. It was learning him, piece by piece, memory by memory. The Bloomblights weren't just soldiers; they were shrines built on a ghost's life. If the King was using Soren's past as a blueprint, then it wasn't just hunting them. It was coming for everything Soren had ever touched, everyone he had ever saved. And Nyra knew, with a certainty that chilled her to the bone, where it would strike next. She thought of the one thing that had driven Soren more than anything else, the anchor of his entire existence. The debt that bound his family. The records of that debt were not just paper; they were the heart of his motivation, the symbol of his burden. The King, in its quest to understand him, would inevitably be drawn to that core. It would seek the source of his pain.